‘Fuck these Nazi scum.’
Is what I’m thinking as I drink Matchless‘ Son of a Voss pale ale. That isn’t what I want to talk about. Nazi scum, that is. But that’s where we are…and I’ll get back to it in a minute.
Because the Son of Voss has a forest nose, a little pine in there, but the body of the beer is hinting more at citrus; orange in this case. After a few sips, a more grapefruit scent makes itself known and I’d like to know how they pulled that trick off. At 4.1%, it’s very, very light and the bitterness on the finish constantly threatens to overwhelm the beer.
It doesn’t though, which leaves me with a beer that is pretty easy to drink and wholly appropriate for this heat.
A few days ago, I was talking to a pal about the state of the world and said “I haven’t had to worry about nuclear war in 30 years. I’m not really excited about that.”
She gave me a wan smile and said, “I have to worry every time I leave the city if someone is going to shoot me, or run me off the road. You white people are overdue for some fear.”
Perspective.
In light of the thoughts I’d was having about trust last week, her words stuck with me. It’s difficult to concern yourself with the threat of needless annihilation when your day to day life is threatened by strangers, because you are unable to trust the people in your own country.
The next day, Nazis (and that’s what they are. The alt-right is but white power terrorists) would protest the removal of a Robert E Lee statue from Emancipation Park (just let that irony sink in for a moment), followed by someone taking a car a driving it into an anti-fascist protest, killing someone the day after.
So where the hell does that leave me?
Can someone build trust in an environment like this? Where the shambling moral swamp that is President Trump refuses to repudiate Nazis. How awful of a person does one have to be in order to miss that moral calling?
I’ll tell you why he doesn’t though: They’re loyal.
And some people wonder why women or people of color have difficulty trusting the powers that be. The powers that be have tacitly endorsed Nazis. Which is the same as overtly endorsing Nazis and that leads me back to where I started:
Fuck these Nazi scum.
But again: where the hell does that leave me? Because that isn’t what I want to talk about. I want to talk about how to build those connections.
I wish I had better answers. At the moment, denouncing evildoers and believing women, minorities, people of color or just different, when they tell me they’re frightened, so that I can behave accordingly, that seems…well, it’s a start. These skookin cowards have decided they can be brave, that there will be no repercussions to their hatred because of Trump’s ascendancy to President. That there won’t be consequences: they won. But there needs to be consequences.
I think about what my Dad told me last November: ‘We’re going to have to take a hit, and that sucks. But we have to stand in there and take it,’ and my stomach sinks.
He was right and honestly, I am not looking forward to getting hit. I am, truthfully, scared. Scared of what’s coming out of Washington DC, scared of the fecklessness of those who have an opportunity to stop it and scared of what’s going to hurt me. However, I didn’t have to live with this every. Day. Now that I do-well, some fear is overdue, shall we say?
But, nobody ever said courage was easy.
Nobody ever said building trust was easy.
We’re going to need both of those things in massive handfuls, if we’re going to move forward-without the leadership from the White House. Which we will do, and it’s going to start with saying:
Fuck those Nazi scum. And then living accordingly.
Today’s second pint is going to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
A pint for Dionysus 